10 years ago, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft was launched into space with the purpose of trailing the 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet. Rosetta has finally caught up to the comet and managed to release the Philae lander so that it can survey the huge comet’s surface for sings of the past. According to scientists, the comet can hold the secrets to the universe, since it has been traveling in space for the past billion or so years. Having successfully landed on the comet, it can begin its research and send back data to the Rosetta, which will send it in turn to the researchers on Earth.
Rosetta has traveled 4 billion miles in pursuit of the comet for the past 10 years and the lander it has released is the first man-made object to ever touch a comet in the world. The Philae Lander manager at the DLR German Aerospace Center said that the lander is now on its own and they are eagerly awaiting for it to start communicating data. There is an enormous delay when it comes to the lander sending data from the comet, due to the distance between it and Earth’s satellites. At the moment, the comet and implicitly Rosetta and the Philae lander are 311 million miles away from Earth. The lander’s sensors should provide for valuable data that might contain clues to where we come from and how the universe came to be in the first place. Scientific advisers to the mission say that by studying this particular comet, they would be able to deduce more about any other comet around space.
The lander didn’t have a pleasant journey, reportedly, with communications being interrupted for a while after its release from Rosetta. Supposedly, the active descent system which prevents the lander from bouncing on the surface of the comet have malfunctioned, so the lander needed a bit of luck to make to the comet unharmed. The scientists at the space center could only watch how the lander descended to the comet, because any command they would send to Rosetta would take about half an hour to reach the spacecraft. After the successful landing on the comet, scientists will be able to follow Rosetta and the comet along its journey around the Sun. At those high temperatures, the comet should become more active and provide data that could help scientists explain the formation of celestial objects throughout time. Their hope is that they will find some truth about the theory that comets can host forms of life and upon colliding with Earth, they might have left some of those microorganism there, which later evolved into the lifeforms we can witness today.